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Death Note: A Modern Curse Tablet?

Imagine having the power to settle all those petty debts! And all's you have to do is have an otherworldly god hang over your shoulders the entire time that you use it... oh, and neither go to heaven or hell, for like, ever.

In ancient Roman and Greek society,
so-called “Curse Tablets,” where leaden objects bearing the name of a person
that the owner of the tablet wished to harm; since in both of these societies,
it was presumed that the name of a person was the extension of that person,
sort of akin to their soul, should the name of a person be skewered by a sharp
object—such as a nail—while the name is associated with a magical curse—think of
an angry rant, or the ‘writing letters but not sending them,’ technique—then harm
would befall that person. This was known as image magic.

Outside
of melodramatic gothic dramas involving misunderstood youth, the idea of doing
harm to a person by cursing their name is not something well survived into the
contemporary epoch. But, if there is one text which best encapsulated this idea
with our modern sensibilities, then it would have to be the anime Death Note.

Some
background information: Death Note is
my favorite anime.

Moreover,
it is my favorite anime because, unlike many anime shows, it knew when to stop:
the show lacked filler in the same way other anime relied on filler. Furthermore, it was a detective-mystery inverted,
where the protagonist and antagonist were inverted in an elaborate game of cat
and mouse; what Death Note brought to
the anime fold, other than a great deal of controversy thanks to precocious
teens and their own fake death notes, was a sense of intellectual prizing—the narrative
kept things tense while peppering the sign-system with a plethora of motifs and
thought-provoking escapades which often eschewed the typical route. Whereas
many anime gave little thought to how the protagonist made it from point A to
B, Death Note gave an unusual amount
of detail to the specifics. Whether or not it is so-called ‘Deep Anime’ can be debated,
but it was in the very least an intelligent anime.

Oh,
and it also had Shinigami, or Gods of Death, and a megalomaniacal teenager who
sought world domination thanks to an arcane notebook—the titular death note—which
gave him the power to kill anyone whose name he wrote in it. It had that too.
But, anyways.

So,
here was my surprise when I learned of image magic, that I thought right way of
Death Note.

In
the show, protagonist Light Yigimani acquires the death note by complete
chance. Once in possession, however, he gains the power to kill anyone he
desires simply by writing their name in the death note notebook. It is here
that we see the similarity to image magic but also how it departs from image
magic while also building on the idea of image magic.

Traditionally,
the name engraved on the leaden image must be damaged in some fashion in order
for the spirits of the undead to fulfill their harmful mission. In Death Note, however, this idea is
subverted by the name simply needing to be written (additionally, it is
suggested, though never confirmed, that should a death note become damaged in some
specific way, then it will no longer function); Death Note circumvents this by forcing the notebook user to
imagine the target’s face and while they write their name. This way people
sharing the same name are not killed. Thanks to capitalist fragmentation, though,
this becomes harder due to the many persona oscillating in (what Gilles Deleuze
would call) a disjunctive synthesis: who people pretend to be clashes with
their outward identity and sometimes, as a result, pushes a herd of conformity
thanks to the insufficiently unique number of proper names: as Light himself
discovered, it is easy to write one name but think of another’s image
accidentally while writing.

So it seems that
this is the natural extension of image magic into the modern day. And, indeed,
seems like what even ancient users would have needed to do in order for their
craven sorcery to work (though, I suppose demons have a level of collective familiarity
with the mortal world, so perhaps the magic-user and spirit were symbiotically
connected, thus eliminating the need for the user to actively think of their
target).

Provided,
classically imagined image magic, presumably, had a wide range of possible
effects and I am not sure death was even a likely desire for the invoker (as,
after all, the sourcebook where I am studying the idea of image magic only
bears witness to image magic in association to gambling, where the target doesn’t
need to be killed in order for the curser to get their way). The death note,
meanwhile, has only shown itself capable of killing—not injuring or rendering
feeble, just killing. So, if the writers did intend on the death note being
somehow related to ancient Greek and Roman image magic, as seen in the curse
tablets, then it is a mildly indecent stretch.

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Lately, I was browsing around online and found another handy resource for aspiring medievalists.

Enter, Western Michigan University's Medieval Institute!

The site has links to an extensive book shop, scholarly journals, as well as a free download. See below for links.

General listing: http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medievalpress/
Index of titles available for purchase: http://www.wmich.edu/medievalpublications/all-titles
The 'Medieval Globe' book(s): http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_globe/ (Click on title(s) for free download)

Okay, that is all for now. Sometime soon I think that I would like to organize all of my resource links so that I, as well as you, have a concrete listing of reliable resources. Until then, we shall have to make due.